Re-(W)righting the Nation: Will the Real Winnie Mandela and Robert McBride Please Stand Up?

This paper attempts to reveal the very real woman and the equally real man behind the multiple myths in which these two prominent South Africans have become embedded. In so doing, the grand narratives of struggle come under deconstructive scrutiny. The Cry of Winnie Mandela (Ndebele, 2004), fictional as it may well be and Robert McBride: a coloured life (Mokae, 2004) are part of a new South African literature in which people are portrayed as individuals, as fully human with a range of human emotions and are, as such, made by their own choices in life as much as by the actions of others and through interaction with others. A literary and social space has opened in which new narratives of freedom can emerge. This re-writing of the personal ought also to open the door to a corrective re-writing or righting of the political, ‘to set afoot a new man’ which is also ‘for ourselves and for humanity’ as Frantz Fanon suggests at the end of The Wretched of the Earth